Page 111 of Summer Weddings
Well, he told himself bitterly, he’d learned his lesson when it came to women. He was better off living his life alone. To think he’d been one of the men eager to have the O’Hallorans bring women north!
One thing was certain; he didn’t need this kind of rejection, this kind of pain.
“John?” Sally gazed at him with those beautiful blue eyes of hers. Only this time he wasn’t about to be taken in by her sweetness.
He ignored her and hurried down the stairs to the front door. He’d already grasped the door handle when he realized that Sally had followed him. “You can leave without explaining that ring, but I swear if you do I’ll never speak to you again.”
“I don’t see that it’d matter,” he told her, boldly meeting her eyes. “You weren’t planning on speaking to me anyway.”
He gave her ample time to answer, and when she didn’t, he made a show of turning the knob.
“Don’t go,” Sally cried in a choked whisper. “I thought…that you’d gotten what you wanted and so you—”
“I know what you thought,” he snapped.
“Maybe we could talk about this?” It sounded like she was struggling not to break into tears. He dug inside his back pocket, pulled out a fresh handkerchief and handed it to her.
“Could we talk, John?” she asked and walked down the second flight of stairs to the lower portion of the house. “Please?”
John guessed he was supposed to accompany her. He looked up to find her mother, father, brother and a few cousins whose names he’d forgotten leaning over the railing staring at him.
“You’d better go with her,” Sally’s younger brother advised. “It’s best to do what she wants when she’s in one of these moods.”
“Do you love her, son?” Jack McDonald demanded.
John looked at Sally, thinking a response now would be premature, but he couldn’t very well deny it, carrying an engagement ring in his pocket. “Yes, sir. I meant to ask Sally to marry me, but I wanted everything to be right with us. So I thought I’d introduce myself and ask your permission first.”
“It’s a good man who speaks to the father first,” Sally’s mother said, nodding tearfully.
“Marry her with my blessing, son.”
John relaxed and grinned. “Thank you, sir.” Then he figured he should give himself some room in case things didn’t go the way he hoped. “In light of what’s happened, I’m not sure Sally will say yes. She wasn’t planning on returning to Hard Luck—I’m not sure why, but she hadn’t said a word about it to me.”
“I believe my daughter’s about to clear away any doubts you have, young man. She’ll give you plenty of reasons not to change your mind.”
“Daddy!” This drifted up from the bottom of the stairwell.
John winked at his future in-laws. “That’s what I was hoping she’d do,” he said and hurried down the stairs, his steps jubilant. “Oh, and Merry Christmas, everyone!”
Chapter9
January 1996
It shouldn’t upset her. If anything, Bethany thought, she should be pleased that Randy Kincade was getting married. The invitation for the March wedding arrived the second week of January, when winter howled outside her window and the promise of spring was buried beneath the frozen ground.
Bethany wasn’t generally prone to bouts of the blues. But the darkness and the constant cold nibbled away at her optimism. Cabin fever—she’d never experienced it before, but she recognized the symptoms.
Her hair needed a trim, and she longed to see a movie in a real theater that sold hot, buttered popcorn. It was the middle of January, and she’d have killed for a thick-crust pizza smothered in melted cheese and spicy Italian sausage.
The craving for a pizza brought on a deluge of other sudden, unanticipated wants. She yearned for the opportunity to shop in a mall, in stores with fitting rooms, and to stroll past kiosks that sold delights like dangling earrings and glittery
T-shirts. Not that she’d buy a lot of those things. She just wanted toseethem.
To make everything even worse, her relationship with Mitch had apparently come to a standstill. As each week passed, it became more and more obvious that her feelings for him were far stronger than his were for her.
Whimsically she wondered if this was because God wanted her to know how Randy must’ve felt all those years ago when she didn’t return the fervor of his love.
So now she knew, and ithurt.
